Still deep inside our hearts, we still miss those nostalgic SNES games like Super Mario, donkey kong, the legend of Zelda from the ’90s. The Super Nintendo Entertainment System was the best selling 16bit gaming consoles in the era. Slowly with time, we’ve grown up and SNES consoles become backdated and out of fashion. In this article, we’re listing down some of the best SNES emulators to replay those classic moments.

That’s why getting hands-on over a working SNES console is quite an arduous thing today. Still, there’s a way to get your those childhood moments back with some best SNES Emulators.

Emulators are a great approach to play those classic SNES games in today’s modern computers, macs, and mobiles. It allows users to virtualize a SNES console on their devices. If you’re one of them and want to enjoy your childhood’s favorite retro titles, this blog is for you.

8 Best SNES Emulators for Windows, Mac, Android

Snes9x:

Snes9x is one of the best freeware Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) emulator available in the market designed to play most of the SNES games on your PC or workstation. It’s available for Windows, macOS, Linux platforms. The best part is, Snes9x comes with some rare SNES games that were only released in Japan to date.

This emulator is fairly easy to use and performs quite well without any hiccups on low-end hardware. Users need to download the file from the official website and extract the package. Post extraction, users can launch games without making any adjustments or messing up with settings. Snes9x has some cool features such as Output Image Processing for enhanced graphics, gameplay capture and ability to save in-game progress. Definitely it’s worth, to download and give it a try.

If you’re looking for a great SNES emulator to play those nostalgic sensations on a smartphone, SNES S9x Ex+ is the next one on our list. All of the basic features just like any other SNES emulator such as load game, save state or reset and more, are there out of the box with it. However, the UI is kind of old but still, it’s good to go.

A public-domain game Bio Worm comes preinstalled, aside from it users get the option to load their favorite ROMs. This emulator isn’t much hardware hungry, user can run it on mid-end to low-end Android devices, as the official description says this one only needs a 1GHz+ device for best results.

RetroArch:

best snes emulator

The next addition in our list of best SNES emulators is RetroArch. RetroArch is a highly configurable free to use, open-source emulator, having cross-platform support. Cross-platform features enable users to play those classic retro games on a variety of different computers and platforms easily.

reference implementation libretro API makes it run fast, lightweight, portable on most of the systems. Great thing is, this one has a modern clean user interface and offers advanced features like shaders, netplay, rewinding, next-frame response times, run ahead, gameplay recording and more. The latest update includes Quality of Life improvement for mobile users. RetroArch is available on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android. As well as PS3, PSP, PS Vita, Wii, Wii U game consoles are also supported.

BizHawk:

best snes emulator

BizHawk is one of the easy to use multi-platform SNES emulator with Lua scripting designed for Tool-Assisted Speedruns available only for windows. Basically, if you like “speedrun” and wanna try to complete a game in as quickly as possible, definitely give a try to BizHawk.

It has native support for emulating multiple platforms including the Atari 2600, 7800 and Lynx, Nintendo NES, SNES and N64, Nintendo Gameboy, Sega, Master System, Game Gear, Genesis, Saturn, Sony PlayStation and PSP, Neo Geo Pocket (Color), etc. According to its developers, although developed for TAS, it’s good for casual gaming.

OpenEmu:

In our list, the next one is OpenEmu. OpenEmu is a native multi-system SNES emulator for macOS users. Users can emulate a variety of systems like Atari 2600 / 5200 / 7800 / Lynx, Game Boy, Game Gear, Intellivision, NeoGeo Pocket, Nintendo (NES) / Famicom, Nintendo DS / 64, Sony PlayStation, Sony PlayStation and a lot more. Enabling you to play more retro classic games compared to any other emulators, this one has a range of modular features.

OpenEmu is easy to use and packs with a comprehensive clean user interface. The extreme easy and simplified game library organization feature differentiates it from others. Users can add, browse, organize and with a compatible gamepad, play those favorite games (ROMs). HID-compliant USB or Bluetooth controller support is there as a part of cross-platform. Also, OpenEmu maps control for the following automatically fetching the database.

Higan:

To cut off less accuracy and issues on ZSNES, BSNES was developed long ago with the aim of perfect emulation accuracy. Later, it was renamed to Higan which is now one of the most perfect open-source SNES emulators currently. Users can emulate almost any Super Nintendo game flawlessly using Higan.

ZSNES:

best snes emulator

ZSNES was the most popular and best SNES emulator focused on speed. In Spite of its popularity, the development had shut down and there are no further updates since 2007. This emulator mainly focuses on speed, and for not receiving updates, its accuracy is now quite low than other emulators.

In addition, ZSNES has security issues and some severe bugs. So we don’t recommend to use it on your system, better to go with some other SNES emulators like Snes9x, Bizhwak, RetroArch, bsnes, Snes9x EX+, higan.

That was our recommendation of some of the best SNES emulators available in the market for Windows, mac, Linux and android, ios smartphones. Now download your preferred choice and bring back those childhood moments with SNES emulators.